Do we all dream of life in a garden city?

Companies:

RELATED QUOTES

Nick Clegg is not the first to propose new towns to solve a housing crisis.
But until they have jobs and character, they’ll only be dormitories of big
cities

"It’s time to think big,” says Nick Clegg. Big, that is, about the number of
new homes we need to build in Britain. In a speech given yesterday to the
National House-Building Council, the Deputy Prime Minister was at pains to
stress that “we’re already building 100,000 fewer homes than we need each
year. Over the next decade, each year, the UK is going to grow by around
230,000 households. Last year we managed to complete 117,000, just over half.

“Unless we take more radical action,” he continued, “we will see more and more
small communities wither, our big cities will become ever more congested as
we continue to pile on top of each other, and the lack of supply will push
prices and rents so high that unless you or your parents are very rich
living in your dream home is going to be a pipe dream.”

So how do we “think big”? By building a new generation of garden cities and
suburbs for the 21st century, said Mr Clegg, conjuring visions of fresh air,
patches of lawn, a place to park the cars, and, of course, for the detached
cottage itself, “drawing on the best of British architecture and design”. A
chance, then, for those under 35 and without rich parents to buy a home of
their own, with a kick-start from a new government tax initiative allowing
local authorities to borrow against future business rate revenues to help
them get building. Governments, however, come and go as, it seems, do the
latest housing initiatives and ministers.

The garden city movement, nurtured at the beginning of the 20th century by
Ebenezer Howard, an Esperanto-speaking social reformer born in the teeming
City of London (LSE: CIN.L - news) , gave us Letchworth the first of the genus in 1903,
followed by Welwyn Garden City and, by global extension, Canberra, Brasilia
and the latest new towns around Shanghai.

Adopted by central government, garden city thinking spawned well-meant
post-war new towns: Basildon and Crawley to the south, Washington and
Peterlee up north, Cumbernauld north of the border. The last, and possibly
the most successful, of these was Milton Keynes, announced in 1967.

Mrs Thatcher, however, put an end to the new towns council housing, too
and since then, under New Labour and Coalition governments, we are supposed
to have enjoyed an “urban renaissance”, along with eco-towns, the Thames
Gateway and the positively insane Pathfinder project, whereby streets of
perfectly good 19th-century homes in Liverpool and Manchester (Other OTC: MNCSQ.PK - news) have been
demolished for no discernible reason.

One way or another, all of these initiatives have been failures: New Labour’s
“urban renaissance” descended, year-by-year, into a new Dark Age of rampant,
uncivil property development; while eco-towns a New Labour joke were too
environmentally unfriendly to win friends except among the foxiest property
speculators.

The idea of 21st-century garden cities might sound appealing a
government-backed quintessence of rus in urbe (or urbe in rus) planning
yet the whole point of garden cities is that they were small. Far from
wanting us to think big, Ebenezer Howard imagined his ideal new cities
supporting populations of no more than 30,000. Given over in almost equal
proportions to industry, agriculture and residential areas, these would be
small enough to walk to work in and, wherever possible, self-sufficient.

Given that, according to Mr Clegg, there will be 2.3 million new households
over the next 10 years, an increase in population of perhaps five million
people, we will need more than 150 new garden cities or 10 new cities,
with or without gardens, the size of Liverpool or Manchester. Put this way,
the latest government housing initiative seems absurd, its recommendations
defied by simple mathematics.

In reality, many of these future households will take root in existing towns
and cities, while most people, however poor, will gravitate to London and
the South East a fact that, by itself, highlights one of the greatest
difficulties of building new garden cities. Old or new, towns are shaped
first and foremost by their economies, by trade and manufacturing, by what
they do. There is absolutely no point in building new towns if their primary
purpose is to meet a housing shortage. Households need jobs, and a city is
built around these.

Imagine if a garden city had been decreed close to Swindon in the 1820s. Few
would have been tempted to settle there. But when the Great Western Railway
opened its famous works in 1841, people flocked there to find jobs; this
small market town grew, and continues to thrive, because it built
locomotives, just as Barrow-in-Furness has long spelt submarines,
Northampton shoes, Nottingham lace and Melton Mowbray pork pies, while
London has long been a world-in-a-city, a New Rome, founded, of course, by
the Romans themselves.

Through these economic activities, British towns gained their special
characters. Neither the garden cities nor new towns have matched them, even
though Ebenezer Howard adopted the core ideas underpinning them, on a tide
of soapsuds and a rush of chocolate, from idealistic 19th-century industrial
“villages” notably, Port Sunlight, built by the Lever Brothers;
Bourneville, by George Cadbury; and New Earswick, by Joseph Rowntree.

Letchworth was better known for smocks and calisthenics, its open-air school
for theosophical meditation, and for its first pub, The Skittles, where
alcohol was prohibited, than for its industry. Walter Wilkinson, the Punch
satirist, was moved to verse:

Now what did they want with a milk-and-water pub

When milk shops they were rich in?

Come on, boss! Let’s go and have a drink!

We can get one down in ’Itchin.

If garden cities were seen as arty-crafty, middle class, and the antithesis of
heavy-duty manufacturing towns such as Crewe and Swindon, the new towns were
a fanfare for the common man, woman and booming baby. Even then, culture was
imposed on them from above by well-meaning architects, planners and
mandarins.

What could have been more agreeable than to have watched Sir Kenneth Clark,
garbed in a beautifully bespoke suit, unveil Henry Moore’s Harlow Family
Group in the town of that name one day in 1956? Why, just eight years
earlier, Lewis Silkin, Clem Attlee’s minister of town and country planning,
had told local people shortly before work began elsewhere in Essex:
“Basildon will become a city which people from all over the world will want
to visit.”

Perhaps it is; and yet, for the most part, garden cities and new towns have
become dormitory suburbs of London. Milton Keynes might boast that over half
of those who work there commute locally, yet very many rush up to town
meaning London by train each day.

It seems somehow significant that far away, across the South Atlantic and over
the distant red planalto central of Brazil, politicians and civil servants
are always first in the queue at the airport to join Friday evening flights
from Brasilia, the new federal capital with its garden city plan inaugurated
in 1960, to the sheer exuberance of Rio de Janeiro, a seaside city founded
400 years earlier, ever more crowded and open to the world.

No one doubts that we need new homes in Britain yet, for all their theoretical
appeal, garden cities and their progeny are not the answer. We need to
create or attract new industry, new jobs up and down the country and wrap
new homes around them. Then, new towns and cities with a purpose, a culture
and an identity will emerge, offering a genuine and truly viable alternative
to our hard-pressed old towns and old cities that, meanwhile, we will
continue to stretch, patch and grudgingly nurture.

Yahoo UK & Ireland Finance

Also On Yahoo

Quotes are real-time for NASDAQ, NYSE, and NYSEAmex when available. See also delay times for other exchanges. Quotes and other information supplied by independent providers identified on the Yahoo! Finance partner page. Quotes are updated automatically, but will be turned off after 25 minutes of inactivity. Quotes are delayed at least 15 minutes. All information provided "as is" for informational purposes only, not intended for trading purposes or advice. Neither Yahoo! nor any of independent providers is liable for any informational errors, incompleteness, or delays, or for any actions taken in reliance on information contained herein. By accessing the Yahoo! site, you agree not to redistribute the information found therein.